Love stories never grow old, even if the players do.

Five couples with 291 years of marriage among them agreed to share memories of their romances with the Tribune for Valentine’s Day.

The stories still spark after all these years.

***

Carl Weholt remembers the first time he saw Ruth. It was at a dance in Moscow in 1921.

“I had just come onto the balcony and looked down and there I saw her. I thought, ‘By golly, that’s some baby.’

“She was dancing with some guy. I didn’t know him, but I didn’t like him.”

Carl, a freshman at the University of Idaho, managed to get a dance with the young woman who’d caught his eye. He’s been on her dance card ever since.

They courted for three years and were married Feb. 2, 1924, just a couple of hours after Carl finished his mid-year exams.

They didn’t have much money when they were newly married.

“I wasn’t ready to get married, but I knew some university guy, some smart guy, would grab her, so we got married on a shoestring,” says Carl.

Although they didn’t have much money for fancy entertainment, they had plenty of romance, according to Carl.

“We went out on the porch at night ... the stars were thick in the sky and the moon caused a million diamonds to glitter on the snow. We were happy with one another.”

Today, the sight of Ruth still sparks a twinkle in his 94-year-old eye. “I think she’s pretty,” he says.

“We’ve had a rather good life together,” says Ruth, 89. “It was all like I figured marriage would be. I just wanted a good husband and father for my children and it all turned out that way.”

The couple had five children. He was a teacher and coach for most of his career and she was a homemaker, active in scouting, PTA and church activities. In retirement, Ruth and Carl live in Harpster, on land overlooking the South Fork of the Clearwater River.

Ruth says a granddaughter recently figured out the secret of their long and successful marriage:

“We never argued. We were always able to negotiate and we always trusted each other.”

Carl’s advice to couples today is to remember their wedding vows: “That oath you take when you get married, that meant a lot to me, that this is forever. I respected that.”

***

‘My friend’s girlfriend was coming up (with her friend) and he didn’t know what he was going to do with two girls,” is the way Eldrich Ogden of Clarkston explains how he met his wife, Lois.

After the double date to a Lewiston movie theater, Eldrich and Lois didn’t see each other for two months. But they were on each others’ minds.

Eldrich says he thought about Lois a lot during those summer weeks he was away on a survey crew in the mountains. When he returned, one of the first things he did was show up at her house asking for another date.

“When he came back, I just knew I was going to marry him,” Lois says.

Just a little over four months after their second date, Eldrich and Lois were married. That was 56 years ago last Friday.

Eldrich, 78, is a retired U.S. Post Office employee and Lois, 74, still works as a beautician. They have two sons.

According to Lois, the reason for their long-lasting union is they like to do things together. “That’s the main thing. We’ve been close that way.”

They both agree the most romantic moment of their marriage didn’t come during the early years, but on their 40th wedding anniversary. They celebrated by traveling to Yellowstone National Park, where they rode snowmobiles and had lunch at Old Faithful.

“We still have a good time,” Lois says.

***

John and Janet Fiske of Moscow remember how they met a little differently.

She says he was eavesdropping. He says he simply recognized her as his friend’s sister.

Of course, John, 84, also has another version of how they met, which he readily admits has no basis in truth, yet causes him to chuckle with delight.

He says he was teaching at Coe College in Cedar Rapids and she, a student, said to him, “ ‘Oh professor, I’d do anything for an A.’”

The Fiskes really found each other in 1939 at the breakfast table of the International House in New York City, where they both lived while attending graduate school. She was telling a friend about her brother, who’d just spent three years in Turkey.

John, who’d been in Turkey with her brother, overheard the conversation.

“You’re not Ed Murray’s sister are you?” he asked.

Their friendship grew. “When other (men) came to visit, he didn’t like it,” says Janet. “He told me I was living a lie. ‘You should stick with me,’ he said.” They were married Sept. 14, 1940, and spent the next 30 years living in many parts of the world as John’s career as a teacher and a member of the Foreign Service took them to Bangladesh, Russia, Germany, Zaire and Iceland.

They moved to Moscow in 1970 and John taught French at the University of Idaho until he retired.

Janet, 81, remembers their sojourn in the other Moscow as being particularly romantic.

“We lived out in the country so we had lots and lots of evenings when we had nothing to do. To amuse ourselves ... we used to talk about our past lives. That was pretty romantic because we bared our past adventures.”

Even though they spent time in exotic places, John says his most romantic moment with Janet was their wedding.

“It was just the fact she was there. I loved her very much.”

♥♥♥

When Archie Weatherly was a patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital for two weeks in 1930, the nurses kept him busy repairing light cords and sewing machines and other broken objects.

He also kept them busy.

“There were two or three or four or five of them. I made a date with all of them,” he says.

One of the nurses was Alberta, who thought Archie was pleasant and easy to get along with. She also knew his mother and sister.

“She was a really nice girl,” says Archie.

“He had arranged a date with me later on, after he had recuperated,” she says. It didn’t take long for them to realize they wanted to spend their lives together.

“It’s just that we enjoyed each other, so we thought it was time to get married,” Alberta says. “We had a lot in common.”

They were wed Feb. 27, 1932.

Archie, 89, had a tire shop and later worked for the Clarkston School District. Alberta, 82, continued to work as a nurse while they raised their son. and daughter.

One of the secrets to their long marriage may be the fact neither one of them cares much for TV. Instead, they’ve enjoyed doing things together. In their earlier years, they both played at social gatherings, he with his violin, she on the organ.

Alberta also says good, communication and thoughtfulness has played a role in their happy marriage.

“I think people have to learn to cooperate and think of others as well as themselves.”

Archie’s advice to young couples is to behave themselves.

“Leave other people alone. ... When they get married there’s only one person they should stay with.”

♥♥♥

If Lynn Richmond hadn’t received a direct order from his captain, he may never have married Tommy.

The order was for him to attend a Fourth of July party in the nurses’ quarters at Fort Bragg, N.C. It was there he met Sidney (Tommy) Thomas, whose date hadn’t shown up.

“I heard them say, ‘Hell, they’d look like Mutt and Jeff,’ ” Lynn says. He towers over Tommy, who is just 4 feet 11¾ inches tall, but they turned out to be a perfect match. They dated until Lynn was sent on manuevers in September.

“I missed her very much. ... And when I got back, it was all arranged. Little did we know Uncle Sam would separate us.”

They planned the wedding for Dec. 5, 1942, expecting Tommy would be forced to retire and they could live together. But the Army changed the rules to prohibit married couples from sharing the same house or even serving on the same base.

“It turned out OK,” Tommy says. “We went ahead and got married anyway because he was going overseas. I was willing to wait for him. And then I got shipped overseas, too.”

So, until the war ended in 1945, they belonged to the military first and to each other second.

Lynn and Tommy were able to spend short periods together. He especially remembers the time he got leave to visit Tommy at the hospital in Florida where she was stationed.

Tommy hadn’t been able to change her night shift, so Lynn spent 10 days following her up and down hospital corridors as she made her rounds.

At the end of another visit, he recalls watching Tommy leave to board her train.

“One of the saddest things I remember is watching her walk down this long corridor. It was sad and romantic.”

Both of them were later sent overseas and it was in 1944, in British-ruled India, that Tommy suffered a 30-foot fall that left her with permanent injuries. Her skull and facial bones were shattered and the vision in both eyes damaged. She was sent home to recuperate.

Lynn wasn’t told of the accident until six weeks later and it took another six weeks for him to get back to the states from his post in Europe. And then, they had only two months together before Lynn was sent back overseas.

Tommy says at the time she resented the Army’s rule that kept them apart, a rule that since has been changed again to allow married couples to live and serve together.

After the war, Lynn, now 75, began a long career in the food processing industry. Tommy, now 80, became a homemaker. They had one son and made their home in Lewiston.

Lynn says there’s no particular secret that’s made his marriage a success. Maybe what brought them together has kept them together.

“I felt like a stranger and then I met her,” he says.

This story was published in the Feb. 14, 1994, edition of the Lewiston Tribune.